We’re living in Robert Anton Wilson’s world.

One can only hope.

Reason: Live From Chapel Perilous: We’re living in Robert Anton Wilson’s world.:

"Robert Anton Wilson is the unacknowledged elephant in our cultural living room: a direct and indirect influence on popular books, movies, TV shows, music, games, comics, and commentary.

...Allusions to Wilson’s work appear in places both classy and trashy: There’s a Wilsonian stamp on films as diverse as Magnolia, The Mothman Prophecies, and Sex and Lucia, and it’s because of Wilson and Shea that the Illuminati, a secret society that once lurked only in right-wing conspiracy tracts, became the villains of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Now Wilson’s the star of a lively documentary, Maybe Logic, that’s being screened at film festivals and distributed on DVD.

Wilson is a primary source for the ironic style of conspiracism, a sensibility that treats alleged cabals not as intrigues to be exposed or lies to be debunked but as a bizarre mutant mythos to be mined for laughs, metaphors, and social insights. If you were an amused aficionado of conspiracy folklore in 1963, you were a lone hobbyist or specialist. By 1983, you could turn to a number of fanzines, comics, and weirdo institutions such as the Church of the SubGenius, a satiric cult founded by some Illuminatus! fans. By 1993, you were a target market for several half-joking mass-market conspiracy tomes; your sensibility was reflected regularly in magazines such as Mondo 2000 and The Nose; and two brand new pop juggernauts were about to enter your heart: The X-Files and the World Wide Web.

And by 2003, this was all standard background noise. These days, choosing your politics is a matter of choosing who you’re more afraid of, the Washington cabal that’s openly trying to erase your freedoms or the various foreign cabals that are openly trying to kill you. Like it or not, we’re living in Robert Anton Wilson’s world.

...If there’s a central message to Wilson’s work, the film tells us, it’s the agnostic notion that you can’t be completely certain about anything -- and that even when you’re pretty sure an idea is baseless, it might be fun to entertain it for an evening. Somewhere between absolute belief and absolute incredulity, he tells us, the universe contains a maybe. To which anyone who follows the news these days can reply: No doubt."